NuScale's Small Nuclear Reactor Gets US Safety Approval (arstechnica.com) 168
tomhath shares a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, the first small modular reactor received a design certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meaning that it meets safety requirements and could be chosen by future projects seeking licensing and approval. The design comes from NuScale, a company birthed from research at Oregon State University that has received some substantial Department of Energy funding. It's a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide steel cylinder (23 meters by 5 meters) capable of producing 50 megawatts of electricity. (The company also has a 60-megawatt iteration teed up.) They envision a plant employing up to 12 of these reactors in a large pool like those used in current nuclear plants.
The basic design is conventional, using uranium fuel rods to heat water in an internal, pressurized loop. That water hands off its high temperature to an external steam loop through a heat exchange coil. Inside the plant, the resulting steam would run to a generating turbine, cool off, and circulate back to the reactors. The design also uses a passive cooling system, so no pumps or moving parts are required to keep the reactor operating safely. The pressurized internal loop is arranged so that it allows hot water to rise through the heat exchange coils and sink back down toward the fuel rods after it cools.
In the case of a problem, the reactor is similarly designed to manage its heat automatically. The control rods -- which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction -- are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor. In the event of a power outage or kill switch, it will drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity. Valves inside also allow the pressurized water loop to vent into the vacuum within the reactor's thermos-like double-wall design, dumping heat through the steel exterior, which is submerged in the cooling pool. One advantage of the small modular design is that each unit holds a smaller amount of radioactive fuel, and so it has a smaller amount of heat to get rid of in a situation like this.
The basic design is conventional, using uranium fuel rods to heat water in an internal, pressurized loop. That water hands off its high temperature to an external steam loop through a heat exchange coil. Inside the plant, the resulting steam would run to a generating turbine, cool off, and circulate back to the reactors. The design also uses a passive cooling system, so no pumps or moving parts are required to keep the reactor operating safely. The pressurized internal loop is arranged so that it allows hot water to rise through the heat exchange coils and sink back down toward the fuel rods after it cools.
In the case of a problem, the reactor is similarly designed to manage its heat automatically. The control rods -- which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction -- are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor. In the event of a power outage or kill switch, it will drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity. Valves inside also allow the pressurized water loop to vent into the vacuum within the reactor's thermos-like double-wall design, dumping heat through the steel exterior, which is submerged in the cooling pool. One advantage of the small modular design is that each unit holds a smaller amount of radioactive fuel, and so it has a smaller amount of heat to get rid of in a situation like this.
drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if it's no longer as vertical as it thinks it is.
Re:drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity (Score:4, Insightful)
So if something manages to tip over this giant cylinder, to near 90-degrees (enough that friction alone would counteract the force of gravity)... while submerged in a pool of water? Seems extremely unlikely, especially if the pool is sized correctly such that it could never get to more than, say, a 45-degree angle.
Safer, cleaner power production like this is going to be critical if we ever hope to move away from fossil fuels more completely.
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Only needs enough lateral force to cause a jam. Jamming has happened a number of times in earthquakes.
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Re: drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity (Score:2)
Are we worried that the fuel rods will ice over now?
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What about a tsunami?
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What about a tsunami?
Please recall the Japanese emergency plan as an example. The Tepco shareholders report clearly, on the order of crystal, estimated a statistically unlikely event that negatively affects both reactors and below flood-level backup generators... what are you, a worry wort?
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. what are you, a worry wort?
Is he hopping around?
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It is amazing how little science is taught in the west. Even now, the idiots in Germany continue to shut down their own nukes, while ignoring the fact that they are building new coal plants as well as
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So if something manages to tip over this giant cylinder, to near 90-degrees [...] while submerged in a pool of water? Seems extremely unlikely,
It doesn't have to be 90 degrees, if damage blocks rod movement or increased friction lowers the force of gravity upon the rod. Earthquake could do it, as could a large external physical force (building fall upon it, tank or apc crashes into it, explosion, meteor strike, etc.)
I don't believe that tweaks to 1970's nuclear plant design makes nuclear power safe and desirable enough for commercial proliferation. If anything, safety measures will always jack up the plant costs to make it uneconomic to fossil f
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Wait, so you think a couple ounces of nuclear fuel is not safe, yet hundreds of thousands of tons per year being intentionally released into the atmosphere by current fossil fuel based plants *IS*?
Its more than a "couple ounces" of nuclear fuel, especially since you need multiple reactors to match the output of a corresponding FF power plant.
There's still no addressing what to do with the nuclear waste once the plant is decommissioned. So build this new nuclear power plant, it still leaves an untouchable field of death for thousands of years, which is not made more manageable by making many more "brownfields".
In any case, besides the need for the plant design to be "even safer", nuke plants need to
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It could be off by 10% and the rods could have enough friction to stop them lowering automatically.
There's also the coolant, could it cause corrosion on the rods?
And maintenance in the event of protracted civil instability (war, economic disruption)? Or even collapse of civilization?
The modular design is good though, in that it could allow incremental maintenance on just one reactor at a time, even shutting down and decomissioning in a more manageable manner. It solves some problems. But there are other
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Simulated for earthquakes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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Computer simulation they developed themselves... No, we need to build a mock up and shake it.
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Full scale doesn't seem unreasonable for a project like this. Presumably they are going to build a few prototypes anyway. For things like aircraft engines they build full working ones for testing ingestion etc.
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It doesn't seem unreasonable that if they plan to have dozens of these things per plant they could build an extra one or two for testing. Don't even have to be fully operational, in fact you wouldn't want that in case they fail.
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Also, no mention of Godzilla. I mean what if we have a giant lizard destroy it?
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Not if it's no longer as vertical as it thinks it is.
Then bolt it in an upright position. Was that so hard?
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There are plenty of structures that don't tip over, even in earthquakes as large as 8.1
Re:drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity (Score:4, Informative)
gravity is only reliable 12 hours a day.
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Not if it's no longer as vertical as it thinks it is.
A silly comment for the normal use case, which is embedded in the ground.
But it does make me wonder how nuclear submarines handle this.
Gravity operation can still work - it just has to be faster than it takes for the whole ship to tilt over, which is not hard.
If you want something else as reliable as gravity, but not dependent on orientation, springs are the obvious first thought.
As we saw in Fukushima, shutting down a reactor is not the hard part. Cooling it without external power is. Many small reactors
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Submarine nuclear power plants are magnitudes smaller than a nuclear, gigawatt commercial power plant, and of a different design. A sub, by its nature, is surrounded by water, so even if the plant manages to meltdown (and I'm not sure if it can, I'm not a nuclear Navy engineer), being surrounded by water eventually means that molten radioactive material will cool.to a manageable situation. Mind you, this is considering a nuke sub in port or near a busy, shallow waterway. Only hippies care what happens to
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Submarine nuclear power plants are magnitudes smaller than a nuclear, gigawatt commercial power plant
But we are talking about the Nuscale reactor, at 50MWe it is about the same as US naval reactors. (160-220 MW thermal).
I was just thinking that while the "non vertical" above comment is silly, it might be an issue for gravity-powered controls at sea.
The NuScale has the same advantages. But instead of being at sea, it is secured in a large pond. If the pumps fail, they just flood the gap between 2 steel hulls.
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I'm also wondering why this "small" reactor is so big (23m tall). I'm pretty sure nuclear reactors on submarines are smaller than this: the largest ones have a beam of just over 20m, and since the pressure hull is cylindrical and smaller than the beam (due to ballast tanks on its flanks), its height can't be greater than that; so a reactor vessel inside that cylinder has to be still smaller than that. And many nuke boats are considerably smaller than that: a US Ohio-class sub has a beam of 13m.
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I'm also wondering why this "small" reactor is so big (23m tall).
That is the containment vessel. The actual reactor is a bit shorter, and only 2.7m wide, which might allow it to be transported by rail.
There is not the same need to make it smaller like on a submarine. And the benefit is to allow passive cooling after a shutdown.
More surface area is good.
We didnâ(TM)t... (Score:2)
âoeWe didnâ(TM)t anticipate that occurring in our test designs...
Besides, who would have built a power plant in that location?â
Said NuPower representative Bob âoeThree Earsâ Wilson.
As the company moves through bankruptcy, the blame has shifted to MegaJuiceCorp, facing bankruptcy issues of its own. State authorities anticipate entry into the exclusion zone within four years, though many remain skeptical that the Southwest region will safe to enter in the next 120 years.
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Yea, I am waiting for Nagasaki and Hiroshima to have their exclusion zones lifted in another 45 years to be safe to enter in.
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Impressive come back.. I can see the mushroom cloud from here..
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You can swing by for a visit right after the Chernobyl Days Festival in Fukushima.
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People crippled by insufficient mental facility are never going to behave in a "grown up" manner.
If a motor is required to hold up the rods (Score:3)
Whatever the mechanism is that's being driven by the motor can conceivably get jammed / get corroded / simply break. People shouldn't have the idea it's problem-proof - it's still going to require regular inspection and maintenance.
I like the overall concept, regardless.
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Whatever the mechanism is that's being driven by the motor can conceivably get jammed / get corroded / simply break. People shouldn't have the idea it's problem-proof - it's still going to require regular inspection and maintenance.
I like the overall concept, regardless.
Which is why you have MULTIPLE rods and motor combinations.. So should one fail to drop, the others still will and you will be fine.
This system apparently designed with multiple fail safe systems to such a degree that you can literally just pull the plug and walk away. Past light water reactors where not things you can turn your back on, if they are operating near their capacity you are committed literally for days. You have to provide cooling water and keep it moving for DAYS after you drop the control ro
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yeah, large pools of water are obviously the solution.
until they start boiling away and threatening to fail to perform their job. like they very almost did at Fukushima.
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This one is designed for the water to boil away. By the time the water is gone, the core is cool enough that it only needs air cooling.
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Provided the control rods have been fully inserted, killing the primary reaction.
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But then someone wants to save money. The politics causes anger at cost overruns. Corners get cut. Look back at past reactors - I'm pretty sure at Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichii that they had competent engineers. Chernobyl, of course they cut corners, Soviet style, but corners are always being cut.
Competent engineers helped build the bridge, but a project manage cut corners and used substandard steel. So this points to an idea perhaps that engineering for such vital and/or dangerous systems n
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One man's "cut corner" is another's "Risk Mitigation", risk is a part of life and you better get used to the thought. We make all sorts of risk trade offs based on costs. Case it point, what car do you drive? What! You don't drive a brand new 2020 Toyota Camry? WTH mam... Surely you could afford a Ford Escape or something safer than that death trap you are in now..
Kidding aside, In this case, the risk is pretty low. Why? Because these reactors are build in a factory, not on site. They are mass produ
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I have a brand new 2020 Toyota non-Camry (bought in 2019 so it's old now, but it's been sitting mostly idle for several months :-).
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Re: If a motor is required to hold up the rods (Score:2)
Sure, but if the motors fail, that means the control rods fall and the reactor shuts down. The goal is to design them so that if something fails the whole thing goes stop, not boom
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Sure, but if the motors fail, that means the control rods fall and the reactor shuts down.
People seem to be misunderstanding my point. The thing is - things can and will go wrong, even in a "fail into the off state" sort of system. To give a simple example - a control rod might snap near the bottom, which could cause the rod to be unable to drop depending on the type of break and whether the two pieces remain aligned. Another scenario - corrosion could build up on the channel the rod sits in during normal operation, rendering the rod unable to drop because of frictional forces. A third scenario
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People seem to be misunderstanding my point. The thing is - things can and will go wrong, even in a "fail into the off state" sort of system.
Its not much of a point. Perhaps you should have phrased it as a question: Is it really possible to engineer the components so the "motor" is sufficiently reliable?
Well, why not? You might aim for a 5% failure rate over 50 years (reactor core loses only 5% of capacity over lifetime), so 1000 year MTBF for individual switches.
That is not an insurmountable challenge: I suspect "motor" should have been better translated as "solenoid". But it would be interesting to know how they do it. Probably not a DC br
Re: If a motor is required to hold up the rods (Score:5, Insightful)
1) It is a conceit to believe all the edge cases have been considered.
2) There is also the "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" factor.
"No engineer is going to intentionally-"
"Morton Thiokol. Fukushima. 737-Max."
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Norton Thiokol informed NASA that the O-Rings would not function at those temperatures. NASA ignored them. Shuttle went boom as a result of NASA ignoring specs, period.
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According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], what you described did happen in the first conference call: Morton Thiokol engineers objected, and their management upheld them, despite NASA's protests. Reportedly there was a second conference call in which only MT's managers--not any engineers--were present, along with NASA, and the managers bowed to NASA's pressure. A slightly different history of the calls is given here: https://www.latimes.com/scienc... [latimes.com]. But in both versions (and other versions I've r
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The worry isn't that the system can't break. The worry is that the system still needs to function in the event of a loss of power. That seems like a crazy thing to worry about with a power plant, but it is a apparently a serious problem with nuclear plants. Many of the older designs assume they'll have plenty of power, but in the event of a natural disaster they can need to shut down (and thus can't power their own safety systems) at a time when they're cut off from the grid. Lack of external power was
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>The worry is that the system still needs to function in the event of a loss of power.
Well, maybe not addressing a loss of power but they do boast about black start capability. No external grid power needed to power it up.
https://www.nuscalepower.com/b... [nuscalepower.com]
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No thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No thanks (Score:4)
We have moved beyond Nuclear power now. Green energy is taking over. Wind and solar and batteries are the future (and cheaper).
Whatever has the highest ROI for utility companies, that is what they will go with. They will never admit publically that it is all about the money and making sure their stock and bondholders make the returns they demand.
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While you are basically correct, for regulated utilities it is a bit more complicated. The percentage of profit is capped, and the investors only expect for it to remain stable. The utility relies on rate increases approved by the regulating body (e.g. State Utility Commission) to keep cover investments which will keep their costs under control, and their profit at maximum. Therefore, most of a utility companies interest is in pleasing the regulators, either directly, by doing projects that appeal to the
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You seem to think that is a bad thing. in other words, to please you, they should operate wastefully and inefficiently.
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Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
We have moved beyond Nuclear power now. Green energy is taking over. Wind and solar and batteries are the future (and cheaper).
Um, here's a little news. Renewable energy is indeed the future, but it's not quite ready yet. If we want to phase out the burning of petrochemicals as soon as possible (and we surely should), nuclear energy is essential to help us over the transition. Otherwise, it'll take much longer to phase out fossil fuel plants.
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It's true that nuclear power is an important part of transitioning to clean energy. We shouldn't shut down existing nuclear plants that are capable of operating safely, and we should probably finish building plants that are already under construction. But this is a brand new design that's just clearing its first regulatory hurdle. Even if we go as fa
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It is smarter to have an energy matrix, not a single source like just the sun.
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Do the math on how much electricity renewables can produce, then on how much electricity is needed when NOT ONLY carbon-generating electricity production is required to be eliminated but _other_ carbon emitting sources eliminated where at all possible.
To save you the trouble: Using 2005 electrical production as a baseline
renewables can generate roughly 150% of this figure
electrical production accounts for around 1/3 of carbon emissions. Getting rid of the other 2/3 doesn't require a mere tripling of electri
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Reality is that demand doesn't only exist when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.
What provides the base load supply? Ridiculous amount of battery energy storage? Not likely.
Nuclear is an amazing (and necessary) complement to renewables and combined they have a very realistic possibility of completely replacing our current fossil fuel use for energy generation. The SMR design is one of many exciting new designs we should be actively promoting and advancing.
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Nuclear is not a good compliment to renewables because it is expensive and vastly more expensive if you're not going to run it 24/7 at full output.
Batteries are the ideal compliment to renewables along with hydro, pumped hydro and schemes that allow electric cars etc to buffer electricity needs (with financial incentive - cheaper electricity).
Nuclear is the greenest power (Score:4, Insightful)
Go do some research :)
Nuclear is the best option we have, to be honest -- molten salt are the most promising.
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Have we, though?
I mean sure, wind and solar have moved far and are still going strong... I'm just waiting for the completely surprising reveal that solar panels are only this cheap because we buy from the Chinese and every panel comes with the bonus of being responsibility of 0.0005% of a dead child laborer.
Not to mention swathes of the ocean dying because China dumps all the used chemicals untreated into it.
ALL methods of energy production impact the environment. No man ever lived that didn't have a footpr
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Uh huh.
No moving parts? (Score:3)
The description implies that the reactor is cooled without pumps or any moving parts. However the condenser in the turbine loop needs pumps to return the cooled water back to the reactor for re-heating.
What happens if those pumps fail? Obviously the reactor will have to shut down, but it wrong to say that it doesn't need any pumps to keep it from overheating.
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I'm assuming you are asking in good faith versus some of the other posts that have assumed they have found a design flaw with five minute of precursory review that the engineers who have been working on it for years somehow amazingly missed!!...
The answer is that the system is designed to passively shut down and avoid meltdown even if the heat load (electrical generating) portion completely fails. It's pretty cool! Look into it further. Nuclear is a required piece of the puzzle (complementing solar, win
Re:No moving parts? (Score:5, Informative)
The description implies that the reactor is cooled without pumps or any moving parts. However the condenser in the turbine loop needs pumps to return the cooled water back to the reactor for re-heating.
What happens if those pumps fail? Obviously the reactor will have to shut down, but it wrong to say that it doesn't need any pumps to keep it from overheating.
They explain this in the linked article. IF the steam loop pumps fail, this means the site power has been disrupted (or the control system has been misconfigured) then you simply pull the power. The control rods will drop, one way or the other. THEN, the vacuum bottle (which is the primary containment structure) will get flooded if temperature rises too much. The void is filled with water by the control system or by the sealing plugs melting. Then reactor water floods the void. Once the vacuum void is filled with water, it becomes a conductor and dumps the excess heat into the existing cooling pool.
The idea would be for the void to be filled with water by the control system, but just in case, there is a fail safe plug that will flood the insulating void.
You can literally walk away from this thing.. Pull the plug and walk away and it will go to an inert state on its own. Of course a managed shutdown will be more easily recovered from, and there is always the possibility of stupid human mistakes or material flaws causing serious problems, but as far as a light water reactor design, this one is pretty darn safe.
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You're talking about two different things: reactor cooling (the inner loop) and steam production (outer loop). The inner loop can continue to function without the outer loop by using backup cooling, as described in the article.
I predict this will take 20 years (Score:2)
.. to a working model that can go into mass production. Maybe longer and complete failure is certainly an option.
Yay! (Score:2)
Wikipedia has a long list of SMRs [wikipedia.org], but the only designs serious about commercialization in the U.S. and currently licensing are the NuScale and GE/Hitachi BWRX-300.
Interestingly, the BWRX-300 [gepower.com] claims "Competitively priced and estimated to have the lifecycle costs of typical natural gas combined-cycle plants". Because natural gas has been replacing coal, presumably at the same price SMRs could do the same. Even if you don't believe in catastrophic AGW, coal is, from a health and environmental standpoint, ab
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So the Fossil fuel industry is really behind the environmentalist movement?
I just laughed so hard I had Dr Pepper coming out my nose.. Really?
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So the Fossil fuel industry is really behind the environmentalist movement?
I just laughed so hard I had Dr Pepper coming out my nose.. Really?
That means that their scam is working.
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So the Fossil fuel industry is really behind the environmentalist movement?
I just laughed so hard I had Dr Pepper coming out my nose.. Really?
That means that their scam is working.
Of course it does.... And the moon landings where faked on a sound stage in Hollywood... The proof is that NOBODY believes the theory.
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It seems very unlikely they invented the green movement, but it would be very surprising if they didn't at least try to subvert it. And promoting strategies that maintain a dependence on fossil fuels is one way to do that... and it's exactly what the most vocal parts of the green movement in the US have been doing for decades. They may just be fools, but it makes sense that the fossil fuel industry would want to prop up the parts of the green movement that have the least impact to their bottom line if possible.
Mod parent up
Everyone On Slashdot Is A Nuclear Reactor Designer (Score:5, Insightful)
How much radioactive waste will be created? (Score:3)
A quick web search reveals that the US has 80 sites now storing 75,000 metric tons of nuclear fuel waste with the number to double by 2055. This despite the closure of some power plants. Current costs are estimated to be $35 billion to store the current waste, much of it on site of closed power plants, and the costs will increase. These costs are going either be paid from electricity rates or by the federal government from tax revenue. Clearly, there's no free lunch.
Technically, or politically? (Score:5, Informative)
> How much radioactive waste will be created?
Several cubic feet, eventually.
> for how long will that waste need to be securely and safely stored?
Are you asking about the technical requirements, what is required for safety, or are you asking about the political results of FUD?
There are basically two categories of radioactive elements, and a couple different categories of radiation. Plutonium used for weapons, such as Pu-241, gives off energy fairly quickly. With a half-life of 14 years. Fourteen years may seem like a long time, but that's fast for nuclear. You can think of pu-241 as being like a firecracker or a blow torch - there is a lot of energy being released pretty fast, and that can be dangerous. It also "burns up" pretty quick. Pu-241 should be stored where nobody will touch it for 100 years or so. This is the stuff the anti-nuclear people are talking about when they talk about how dangerous it is. Some countries use plutonium fuel; the US doesn't.
Then there are slow, long half-life materials such as the uranium used in this reactor design. Uranium takes thousands or millions of years to release the same amount of energy that plutonium releases in just a few years. It can be compared to a hand warmer or a candle, in contrast to the fast materials that could be compared to a firecracker or blow torch. This ia the stuff the anti-nuclear folks are talking about when they say "lasts thousands of years".
What some people like to do is make these two statements, which are both true:
Some nuclear waste is dangerous
Nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years
Both are true. They are careful to not mention that those two statements refer to two different types of nuclear waste.
The other thing to understand something about is the different types of radiation. Your light bulb produces radiation that allows you to see. This radiation is different from alpha or beta radiation. So we want to be clear about what type of radiation we're dealing with. This graphic gives an easy summary of the different types:
https://i2.wp.com/www.compound... [wp.com]
Uranium as used in this reactor a produces alpha radiation. Alpha is composed of protons and neutrons. Shielding sufficient to stop alpha radiation includes either a piece of paper or 3cm of air, or some skin. Meaning it's easier to shield than alpha, which requires aluminum foil to block it - skin wouldn't protect you if it were beta. Fortunately, it's alpha, so as long as you have skin, you could actually hold it in your bare hand and you're fine. Gloves would be strongly recommend for extra safety, though.
Since it releases the energy over the course of thousands of years, if you are missing skin, you'll want to avoid sitting on the uranium for a thousand years. You should get away from it within a year or so, if it's not covered with paper and you don't have skin to protect you.
Having either a piece of paper or foil or something, or an air gap or some skin between you and the uranium *is* important. Like bleach, drain cleaner, brake fluid, or batteries, you shouldn't eat it. Eating batteries or uranium is bad for you. So don't do that.
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Re:Technically, or politically? (Score:4, Insightful)
> This is a little disingenuous. Sure alpha emitters are safe as long as they are outside the body
I said that. Not once, not twice, but three times.
Don't eat detergent, sunscreen, bleach, drain cleaner, antifreeze, uranium, or poop. These are for external uae only, do not put them inside your body.
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Nobody eats them on purpose. That's a straw man. People worry about nuclear waste (or any other toxic substance) because we are bad at disposing of things responsibly. When waste ends up in the environment, it ends up in bodies without any deliberate action by the people whose body the waste now occupies.
The best solution with long-lived toxic substances is to therefore produce as little of them as possible in the first place. And I say this as someone who is cautiously pro-nuclear power. However, I am
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Oh I hear ya.
It's just that I do risk management for a living, so I have a certain perspective. We humans sure are fucking terrible at "intuitively" calculating and balancing risks. I'm more concerned about the millions of L-ion and other batteries casually thrown out every year, left laying aroundin drawers to eventually catch fire 10 years later, than I am about some stuff buried two miles deep in the rock at Yucca Mountain, protected by heavily armed personnel.
I'm about to go for a drive. While driving
Does that safety approval mean.... (Score:2)
If not, this is only a future accident waiting to happen.
I want one (Score:2)
I'd be willing to clean out a corner of the garage...
Stop with the Control rods already (Score:2)
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I remember that molten salt has been tried in power generation and found to be crap. It causes corrosion problems and if you have to shut down it causes startup problems.
US Safety Approval. (Score:2)
Oh boy (Score:2)
We're rapidly entering a dystopic future where our landscape is filled with endless low-albedo solar panel deserts. Since our energy demand doubles about every 50 years and there is no reason whatsoever to assume that will change, we're heading for a major environmental disaster. We cannot rely on just solar, hydro and wind. Nuclear could help a tiny bit... I had high hopes for this stuff...
But this is not what I'd expect from a 2020 design. Its safety seems to fully depend on the water not leaking out, con
Two questions: (Score:2)
2) could deliver 1.21 GW of power?
Because could be useful for a scientist I've heard of...
Where's Bill? (Score:2)
Not the best (Score:2)
Blow Up (Score:2)
Ok let's assume for Safety sake that the device did tip over and the rods did not get covered. So what would happen then? (I'm sure they have studied all of this already.)
Well I don't know how many rods there are and how much pressure would build up, if the top values would open.(its only a 50 megawatts reactor)
But you could have a small pressure explosion that would open the case and reveal the rods to release the uranium and radioactive water, and may still be hot enough to boil water away, then it would
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23 meters tall and 5 meters wide... what are you going to steal that with, exactly??
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Not to mention the assembled reactor is going to be pretty heavy. Uranium is dense--about the same as gold, nearly twice as dense as lead. I'm not sure how much uranium one of these reactors will contain, but don't forget the pressure vessel and other parts.
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FFS people give *me* shit about finding the flaws in things, but you take the cake. They'll be just as guarded as any other nuclear installation ever was. Perhaps more so because they could be portable. But you'd have to be a madman to just try to walk off with these. You'd need a nuclear engineer in your crew to ensure you survived to make your d
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..because it's going to sit out in the open where you can just drive up with your semi truck full of fertilizer bomb and blow it all up
Go away, don't come back until you've stopped being ridiculous.
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To steal. Trouble with having lots and lots of small local reactors instead of one large central one is that they get harder to guard and easier to just load onto the back of a truck and drive off with and get some enriched uranium to mess about with.
It's not the enriched uranium I'd be concerned with... After these things have been in operation, there are all sorts of dangerous garbage to be had in the cores, but unless you have a fuel reprocessing facility in your back yard, about the best you can do is kill yourself from radiation making a dirty bomb.
Don't fool yourself. Making a nuclear weapon isn't something that you are doing to do with reactor fuel in your garage. It takes a huge amount of very expensive equipment to produce bomb components an